| SAXONICA |
Saxon implements the element extensibility feature defined in the XSLT standard.
This feature allows you to define your own instruction types for use in the stylesheet. These
instructions can be used anywhere within a content constructor, for example as a child
of xsl:template, xsl:if, xsl:variable, or of a literal
result element.
User-written extension instructions are not currently supported on the .NET platform.
If a namespace prefix is to be used to denote extension elements, it must be declared in the
extension-element-prefixes attribute on the xsl:stylesheet element, or the
xsl:extension-element-prefixes attribute on any enclosing literal result element or
extension element.
Saxon itself provides a number of stylesheet elements beyond those defined in the
XSLT specification, including saxon:assign, saxon:entity-ref,
and saxon:while. To enable these, use the standard XSLT extension mechanism: define
extension-element-prefixes="saxon" on the xsl:stylesheet element, or
xsl:extension-element-prefixes="saxon" on any enclosing literal result element.
Any element whose prefix matches a namespace listed in the extension-element-prefixes
attribute of an enclosing element is treated as an extension element. If no class can be
instantiated for the element (for example, because no ExtensionElementFactory can be loaded,
or because the ExtensionElementFactory doesn't recognise the local name), then fallback
action is taken as follows. If the element has one or more xsl:fallback children, they are
processed. Otherwise, an error is reported. When xsl:fallback is used in any other context, it
and its children are ignored.
Within the stylesheet it is possible to test whether an extension element is implemented by using the system
function element-available(). This returns true if the namespace of the element identifies
it as an extension element (or indeed as a standard XSLT instruction) and if a class can be instantiated
to represent it. If the namespace is not that of an extension element, or if no class can be
instantiated, it returns false.
To invoke a user-defined set of extension elements, include the prefix in this attribute as
described, and associate it with a namespace URI that ends in "/" followed by the fully qualified
class name of a Java class that implements the net.sf.saxon.style.ExtensionElementFactory interface.
This interface defines a single method, getExtensionClass(), which takes the local name of the element
(that is, the name without its namespace prefix) as a parameter, and returns the Java class used to
implement this extension element (for example, return SQLConnect.class). The class returned must
be a subclass of net.sf.saxon.style.StyleElement, and the easiest way to implement it is as a subclass of
net.sf.saxon.style.ExtensionInstruction.
Implementing extension instructions
The best way to see how to implement an extension element is by looking at the example, for SQL
extension elements, provided in package net.sf.saxon.sql, and at the sample stylesheet books-sql.xsl
which uses these extension elements.
The StyleElement class represents an element node in the stylesheet document. Saxon calls methods
on this class to validate and type-check the element, and to generate a node in the expression tree that is
evaluated at run-time. Assuming that the class is written to extend ExtensionInstruction,
the methods it should provide are:
|
prepareAttributes() |
This is called while the stylesheet tree is still being built, so it should not attempt to navigate the tree. Its task is to validate the attributes of the stylesheet element and perform any preprocessing necessary. For example, if the attribute is an attribute value template, this includes creating an Expression that can subsequently be evaluated to get the AVT's value. |
|
validate() |
This is called once the tree has been built, and its task is to check that the stylesheet
element is valid "in context": that is, it may navigate the tree and check the validity of the element in
relation to other elements in the stylesheet module, or in the stylesheet as a whole.
By convention, a parent element contains checks on its children, rather than the other way around: this allows
child elements to be reused in a new context without changing their code. The system will automatically call the
method If the extension element is not allowed to have any children, you can call If there are any XPath expressions in attributes of the extension instruction (for example a |
|
compile() |
This is called to create an Expression object which is added to the expression tree. See below for further details. |
|
isInstruction() |
This should return true, to ensure that the element is allowed to appear within a template body. |
|
mayContainSequenceConstructor() |
This should return true, to ensure that the element can contain instructions. Even if it can't contain anything else, extension elements should allow an xsl:fallback instruction to provide portability between processors |
The StyleElement class has access to many services supplied either via its superclasses or via
the XPathContext object. For details, see the API documentation of the individual classes.
The simplest way to implement the compile() method is to return an instance of a class that is
defined as a subclass of SimpleExpression. However, in principle any Expression object
can be returned, either an expression class that already exists within Saxon, or a user-written implementation.
A subclass of SimpleExpression should implement the methods getImplementationMethod() and
getExpressionType(), and depending on the value returned by getImplementationMethod(),
should implement one of the methods evaluateItem(), iterate(), or process().
